The Official Edition of Laudato Si’ is Now Available

The final and official edition of Laudato Si’ is now available online through the Vatican website.

Earlier we reported about its leak (the real text seems shorter), had a Catholic climate expert comment on what we can expect, and played some Mad Libs with it.

Later today you’ll see some commentary on the real thing.

If you want to see young Catholic intellectuals totally geek out, follow their twitter feeds right about now.

Before I go, a quick important passage from Laudato Si’ that challenges the environmental movement to recalibrate its priorities:

It needs to be said that, generally speaking, there is little in the way of clear awareness of problems which especially affect the excluded. Yet they are the majority of the planet’s population, billions of people. These days, they are mentioned in international political and economic discussions, but one often has the impression that their problems are brought up as an afterthought, a question which gets added almost out of duty or in a tangential way, if not treated merely as collateral damage. Indeed, when all is said and done, they frequently remain at the bottom of the pile. This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric. Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

You can get the encyclical in book edition here.

It seems that in an unprecedented move the Vatican has release a video. Here’s Laudato Si’: The Video.